Saturday, September 16, 2017

tomdispatch |Ever
since the Pentagon with its 17 miles of corridors was completed in
1943, that massive bureaucratic maze has presided over a creative fusion
of science and industry that President Dwight Eisenhower would dub “the
military-industrial complex” in his farewell address to the nation in
1961. “We can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national
defense,” he told
the American people. “We have been compelled to create a permanent
armaments industry of vast proportions” sustained by a “technological
revolution” that is “complex and costly.” As part of his own
contribution to that complex, Eisenhower had overseen the creation of
both the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, and a
“high-risk, high-gain” research unit called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, that later added the word “Defense” to its name and became DARPA.

For
70 years, this close alliance between the Pentagon and major defense
contractors has produced an unbroken succession of “wonder weapons” that
at least theoretically gave it a critical edge in all major military
domains. Even when defeated or fought to a draw, as in Vietnam, Iraq,
and Afghanistan, the Pentagon’s research matrix has demonstrated a
recurring resilience that could turn disaster into further technological
advance.

The
Vietnam War, for example, was a thoroughgoing tactical failure, yet it
would also prove a technological triumph for the military-industrial
complex. Although most Americans remember only the Army’s
soul-destroying ground combat in the villages of South Vietnam, the Air
Force fought the biggest air war in military history there and, while it
too failed dismally and destructively, it turned out to be a crucial
testing ground for a revolution in robotic weaponry.

To
stop truck convoys that the North Vietnamese were sending through
southern Laos into South Vietnam, the Pentagon’s techno-wizards combined
a network of sensors, computers, and aircraft in a coordinated
electronic bombing campaign that, from 1968 to 1973, dropped more than a
million tons of munitions — equal to the total tonnage for the whole
Korean War — in that limited area. At a cost of $800 million a year,
Operation Igloo White laced
that narrow mountain corridor with 20,000 acoustic, seismic, and
thermal sensors that sent signals to four EC-121 communications aircraft
circling ceaselessly overhead.

At
a U.S. air base just across the Mekong River in Thailand, Task Force
Alpha deployed two powerful IBM 360/65 mainframe computers, equipped
with history’s first visual display monitors, to translate all those
sensor signals
into “an illuminated line of light” and so launch jet fighters over the
Ho Chi Minh Trail where computers discharged laser-guided bombs
automatically. Bristling with antennae and filled with the latest
computers, its massive concrete bunker seemed, at the time, a futuristic
marvel to a visiting Pentagon official who spoke rapturously about “being swept up in the beauty and majesty of the Task Force Alpha temple.”

However,
after more than 100,000 North Vietnamese troops with tanks, trucks, and
artillery somehow moved through that sensor field undetected for a
massive offensive in 1972, the Air Force had to admit
that its $6 billion “electronic battlefield” was an unqualified
failure. Yet that same bombing campaign would prove to be the first
crude step toward a future electronic battlefield for unmanned robotic
warfare.

In the pressure cooker of history’s largest air war, the Air Force also transformed an old weapon, the “Firebee” target drone,
into a new technology that would rise to significance three decades
later. By 1972, the Air Force could send an “SC/TV” drone, equipped with
a camera in its nose, up to 2,400 miles across communist China or North
Vietnam while controlling it via a low-resolution television image. The
Air Force also made aviation history by test firing the first missile
from one of those drones.

The
air war in Vietnam was also an impetus for the development of the
Pentagon’s global telecommunications satellite system, another important
first. After the Initial Defense Satellite Communications System launched
seven orbital satellites in 1966, ground terminals in Vietnam started
transmitting high-resolution aerial surveillance photos to Washington —
something NASA called a “revolutionary development.” Those images proved so useful that the Pentagon quickly launched
an additional 21 satellites and soon had the first system that could
communicate from anywhere on the globe. Today, according to an Air Force
website, the third phase of that system provides
secure command, control, and communications for “the Army’s ground
mobile forces, the Air Force’s airborne terminals, Navy ships at sea,
the White House Communications Agency, the State Department, and special
users” like the CIA and NSA.

At
great cost, the Vietnam War marked a watershed in Washington’s global
information architecture. Turning defeat into innovation, the Air Force
had developed the key components — satellite communications, remote
sensing, computer-triggered bombing, and unmanned aircraft — that would
merge 40 years later into a new system of robotic warfare.